CHAPTER ONE
MY PARENTS, Charles Delton, and Theresa E. (Kirby) Reynolds were born near rural Rocky Mount, Virginia, about 300 miles from Annapolis, Maryland. The Lord of Ligonier, an eighteenth-century British slave ship, sailed from the Ivory Coast of Africa across the Atlantic Ocean and through the Chesapeake Bay, where it unloaded slaves in Annapolis in 1767. It is the only recorded voyage in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database for this vessel. Only 98 of the 140 slaves who made the trip survived. One of them was Kunta Kinte, an ancestor of Alex Haley, the famed author of the novel Roots. According to historical records, William Waller bought Kinte at the auction. Waller and John Reynolds, who also bought slaves from the ship, were Virginia plantation owners from Spotsylvania County, which is about 180 miles from Rocky Mount. Considering I share the same surname as John Reynolds, it is not a stretch to believe that one of my ancestors may have been on the ship, too. Slaves often took the surnames of their masters, a demeaning practice put eloquently into verse by one of the greatest Americans of all:
“The whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my purpose whilst remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father.”
— Frederick Douglass
My father was an alcoholic. Born in 1938, he was handsome; a tall, slim, light-complexioned man with beautiful, black, curly hair. His family were sharecroppers, and he dropped out of school in the sixth grade to help farm the land. He was the fourth son of ten children. They grew up in a white two-story structure that looked like a plantation house. It had giant circular pillars on either end of an expansive raised porch that evoked images of ancient Rome. The pillars supported the upstairs balcony where my grandparents would sit and watch the sun go down on the sprawling land that wasn’t theirs—land owned by Doctor F.B. Wolfe, a wealthy White obstetrician from one of Virginia’s most prominent families. I don’t doubt slave owners, possibly the Wolfe’s ancestors, once lived in the house. Many sharecroppers were former slaves. Once freed, they had no place to live or any means of making money, so they farmed the land in exchange for housing and a share of the crops produced. Thus sharecropping, much like welfare over a hundred years later, became generational. Ironically, while the descendants of my father’s family, the Reynoldses, toiled in hay and cornfields, my mother’s family farmed the product with which RJ Reynolds has become synonymous: tobacco.
My mother, a dark-complexioned, buxom woman, was born in 1940, the second oldest child of five brothers and one sister. Her family owned their house and land. The original house was an old, wooden two-story structure on at least forty acres with a stable of hogs, roaming chickens, grazing cows, and at least one mule. Two large wooden sheds, where the picked tobacco leaves were hung to dry, stood within fifty yards of the house. The family cemetery was about one hundred yards in the other direction. Filled with ancestors going back as far as the early 1800s, some of the grave markers only had a name and date of death etched in them; a few only had a first name and year of death.
My mother’s father, Rufus Kirby, was an intensely dark-skinned man. Originally from West Virginia, he married into the land passed down to his wife, Helen Tyree, a direct descendant of the property’s original owners and a woman so light-skinned she could have passed for White. For reasons still shrouded in obfuscation, the family sent my mother to live with her paternal aunt and uncle in Detroit, Michigan, as a young teenager. She got pregnant at fifteen years old while attending Northwestern High School, and her aunt sent her back to Rocky Mount. The stigma of an unwed pregnancy was unacceptable during that time. The family hid my mother’s condition, and in August of 1957, she gave birth in an upstairs bedroom to a baby girl named Linda Faye. No one in Rocky Mount knew the shame of Linda being born out of wedlock. To the good folk of this quaint little town, she was my mother’s baby sister, the last of eight children.
Less than a year later, my mother got pregnant again, this time by my father. I never knew how my parents met, just as I never learned why my mother’s family sent her to Detroit. Somehow, despite my ignorance, I feel that it is probably the worst-kept secret in a town so small that everyone knows everything about everybody.
My parents were married at 5:00 p.m. on December 24, 1958, in an obvious shotgun wedding, as Doctor Wolfe delivered my brother David just two weeks later. My parents moved into a one-room wooden shack about five hundred feet behind the big white house where my father’s family lived. A wood-burning stove, which also doubled as a heat source in the winter, was in the center of the room. As there was no way that anyone related to the original occupants of the big house would have lived in a structure such as this, it was, at one time, most assuredly quarters for slaves or newly freed ones with nowhere else to go. And here, on the site of generations of racial inequality, is where I was conceived.
I was born Fredrick Douglas Reynolds at Franklin County Hospital on November 5, 1961. My birth certificate shows my father’s occupation as a farmer and my mother as a housewife. Our races are all listed as “N.” Doctor Wolfe also delivered me. I was a breech baby. Breech deliveries are high-risk, and the baby often dies. Sometimes the mother dies as well. The older women in Rocky Mount believed that breech babies were old souls who came into the world ready to run. This belief is apparent in my given name. Most babies born during this era were named after biblical figures. I was named after an escaped slave turned abolitionist and statesman. My genealogy shows that I am Nigerian and Cameroonian with mixtures of Benin, Togo, and Mali. It is no surprise that I have British (Welsh), Irish, and Scottish blood as well. There are no true descendants of Africans forced into slavery in the Americas who do not have any Caucasian blood in them.
The wooden shack where I was born was built on stilts, and I can vaguely remember seeing a black snake crawling out from under it once. The odor of the nearby outhouse where my parents relieved themselves is more vivid, however. Other than one other outhouse near the white house, there were only three buildings on the land: our shack, the white house, and a barn not far from a bullpen. To take baths, my father had to get water from the well, heat it on the stove, and pour it into a metal tub. An old, ornery rooster sounded the alarm every morning just before sunrise, signaling it was time for my father to get up and begin his work for the day while my mother stayed home, cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes by hand on a washboard. She had gotten a taste of the big city lights while living with her aunt and uncle. I am sure it was quite a culture shock for her going from Detroit to living in a small wooden shack and performing tasks such as these.
My father was a simple man, however. He was content living there and helping his family sharecrop the land they lived on, even though many other Southern Blacks had been moving north in search of better opportunities. In a trenchant contrast to the forced diaspora of their ancestors’ roles in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Southern Blacks migrated to Detroit for a less oppressive culture after the Civil War. Thousands more would move there over the next fifty years, mostly living in a sixty-block area east of Woodward Avenue known as Paradise Valley and the “Black Bottom.”
Detroit’s population was more than two million by the early 1940s. Ford Motor Company was the leading employer of Blacks at twelve percent of its entire workforce. Detroit became a symbol of cultural rebirth and was known as the “Paris of the Midwest.” The phrase, “When I die, bury me in Detroit” was the rallying cry among Blacks far and wide due to the city’s growth and employment opportunities. There is no doubt that my mother, having had a taste of that prosperity and urban sprawl, longed to return there. Either because of her wistfulness or insistence, my father joined the ongoing migration. My mother would have been ecstatic and my father apprehensive as they packed David and me and our meager belongings in the car. And after saying our goodbyes to my father’s extensive family as they gathered on the porch of the white house, he drove us there in 1963 with the Green Book: The Black Traveler’s Guide to Jim Crow America nestled securely in the glovebox. Ford Motor Company hired him the following year.
We lived in at least five different apartments during the early years, all in horrible areas and rooted in squalor. Cockroaches ruled the roost even after the lights came on. Several had rats as big as small cats. A particularly temerarious one bit my mother on the nose while she was sleeping in bed one night. When I was just shy of five years old, I put the stopper in the tub and turned the water on to take a bath. I walked out, and seconds later, I heard horrible screeching and scratching sounds. A kitten-sized black rat was in the tub, struggling to climb out. It had come through the faucet. Instead of calling for my mother or father, I grabbed the box for my favorite toy, a View-Master stereoscope, placed it on top of the rat as the tub filled with water, and held it down with both hands until the thrashing tail was still. To this day, I still have nightmares of screaming rats.
The apartments were all close to my mother’s aunt and uncle’s house, which we frequently visited. I hated going there. My mother’s uncle was a cruel man and taunted David and me incessantly, most often when we mispronounced words. Instead of correcting us, he ridiculed us. He was a small bronze-skinned man with shifty eyes and dark freckles high on his cheekbones. He had short, curly hair and a pencil-thin mustache, blowing smoke from Benson and Hedges cigarettes at us through an insidious smile.
His wife was a plump, brown-skinned woman with short hair who chewed double-mint gum non-stop and wore flower-print dresses and one-inch-heeled shoes. She was extremely cordial to my father, her husband painfully indifferent to him. She never smiled at her husband and sometimes snapped at him while we were there, although I suspect she paid for it later when they were alone. Even at such a young age, I could tell that she was afraid of him. Family rumors persisted that after my mother left their home pregnant, they slept in separate bedrooms and she locked her door at night, especially when he had been drinking.
My youngest brother, Derrick, was born in November of 1965. We lived on the second floor of a two-family flat at the time. It was next to a liquor store and about two blocks behind the Olympia Stadium on Grand River, where the Detroit Red Wings played hockey. Derrick was much darker than David and me. I would frequently ask my mother why, which angered her to no end, sometimes prompting replies of “shut up, boy,” other times, slaps to my head. The demon that is alcohol would grow to haunt my father around this time. During his youth, he often helped his Uncle James “Bus” Nimmo transport bootleg liquor, known as running shine. Uncle Bus had earned his nickname because of his strength, especially when he had been drinking, once breaking his handcuffs after getting arrested. Perhaps my father’s demon grew out of a seed planted by Uncle Bus that strength can come from the bottle; some traumatic, uneven circle-of-life event providing it with fertile soil.
My father was either sad or drunk most of the time. I liked him best when he had been drinking because he was the happiest then. He rarely lost his temper and left all corporal punishment to my mother. He hid liquor bottles all over the house, even under my mattress. My mother poured them into the toilet whenever she found them as he watched, pleading with her not to. He never argued with her or hit her. Instead, sometimes when he got paid, he wouldn’t come home for two or three days. When he returned, smelling like cheap whiskey and even cheaper perfume, my mother would curse him out for being a “whore-chasing drunk” and make him sleep on the couch.
My father often blew his whole paycheck on wine, women, and song within two days. A few times, he came home walking or in a cab after crashing one of our family cars. On at least three occasions, he was arrested for drunk driving. In retrospect, I understand why he sometimes wouldn’t come home. But I also know why he always came back. He loved his boys. All of us. Although my mother clearly showed favoritism toward Derrick, my father treated us all the same. Sometimes he took the whole family to Windsor, Canada just to get ice cream, telling us it was so good they had to make it in another country. And I believed him, too, the taste of the ice cream sweetened by the fact that he and my mother hardly argued the entire time during the trips.
It was around the time my father started drinking a lot that I began having a recurring nightmare. I can see it even now, as plain as day. I hear beating on the side door of our apartment. I look out the window and see a big, inky-black man trying to get inside. He must be a burglar, and he frightens me. I run as fast as I can and hide in a closet filled with dank, musty clothing. There is no one home. Why am I alone at four years old? I’m terrified, scared that the slate-skinned intruder is going to find me. I’m quiet, as still as the field mice that live under the raised front porch of the shack where I was conceived. I grasp my knees and pull them close to my chest, too afraid to even breathe. Please don’t let him find me, I plead to God. I hear the heavy thud of boots walk past the door, thankful that God appears to have listened. And then I just wait. I wait for my father to save me. Where is he, anyway? No matter how many times I have this dream, he never comes back in time to catch the intruder as he plunders the sanctity of our home.
After an eternity, I hear footsteps outside the door, slow and deliberate. The door jerks open, and the dark closet floods with light. It blinds me as I yell, “Please don’t hurt me, mister!” I feel a hand grab my arm, and an irritated voice says, “Shut up, boy. Ain’t nobody gonna hurt you!” The voice is familiar, and I open my eyes. It belongs to my mother. She has saved me from the intruder. But where has she been? My thoughts are interrupted by the crying of my new little brother from another room. Were they here the entire time? I don’t mention the intruder to my mother; somehow, I think she knows him. I wake up then. I convince myself that it was just a dream, but why is it that, to this day, I don’t like small dark places? I never mention the dream to anyone, especially my father. I hated to see my mother yell at him, and something deep inside told me that saying something to him would do more harm than good.
